


Blood Orange

by parttimehuman



Series: Rarepair Galore [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Enemies to super fucking soft boyfriends, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, angst resolved by blood orange juice, therek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 09:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15167927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parttimehuman/pseuds/parttimehuman
Summary: For as long as he can remember caring, Derek Hale has had the monopoly on grim looks and murder vibes in Beacon Hills. Naturally, he doesn't like it when a new bad boy turns up out of nowhere. Rumor has it, the guy has killed several people, he even spent a little vacation in hell. Derek hates Theo Raeken with quite a passion, long before they even meet.What happens when they finally do, nobody could have expected.





	Blood Orange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tabbytabbytabby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabbytabbytabby/gifts).



> Happy birthday to you, Tabby. Thank you for scattering words like glitter over our lives every day.
> 
>  
> 
> Please note that this fic was an experiment. It turned out messy and weird. I might have had a little too much blood orange juice in one day.

For as long as he can remember caring, Derek Hale has had the monopoly of grim looks and murder vibes in Beacon Hills. He’s tall, he’s strong and well trained, he has muscles at body parts where other people don’t even have body parts. He owns just the right kind of black sports car and several dark leather jackets. You can consider yourself lucky as long as he hides his death glare behind obscure sunglasses. 

 

Of course, deep down inside Derek isn’t truly a bad guy. Not at all. He cares for his town, does whatever it takes to protect it. He’s collaborated with all sorts of annoying teenaged supernatural beings to ensure its security. Still, through all of that he’s always liked being the scary guy who nobody would ever dare to mess with. Black suits him well, and so does the thick, dark beard covering his face. 

 

Naturally, Derek doesn't like it when all of a sudden, everybody starts talking about that new kid in town. Rumor has it, the guy has killed several people, he even spent a little vacation in hell. Derek hates Theo Raeken with quite a passion, long before they even meet. He has his sources inside the sheriff’s department, informing him every time they’re searching for Raeken again. He’s said to be a chimera, two supernatural creatures in one, not only a werewolf, but also a werecoyote, and because why the fuck not, on top of everything, he can do a full shift. 

 

It does help a little to know that at least Stiles is on Derek’s side, as always. Or rather, as always since their rough start. But Derek can’t be sure whether Stiles just dislikes Theo out of jealousy of his childhood friendship with Scott, or if he only pretends to distrust the guy because of his alleged crush on Derek, or if he actually has a good reason for it. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because even with Stiles’ support in this, the entire rest of Beacon Hills still seems to be magically drawn to the new unattainable bad boy in town. His own cousin, Malia, has betrayed him by hooking up with Raeken once, or so Derek has heard.

 

The thing is, it takes months before Derek finally gets to meet his nemesis personally. Not that that’s much of a surprise, really, since he’s quite deliberately been trying to avoid an encounter. He’s simply never known how to deal with it. 

 

When it happens, it couldn’t be in any more ridiculous way. It has nothing to do with the supernatural wars their town has to fight on a seemingly regular basis. It’s not a crisis meeting called in for by Scott and his pack. It doesn’t involve death or blood or fangs or claws. It’s almost as if they were mere humans. 

 

They meet at the grocery store. Derek is strolling through the aisles, playing with the pair of sunglasses in his hands, looking left and right without noticing the offered products. He’s getting the same blood orange juice as always anyway. Maybe a banana too. And he should restock his freezer with pizza bagels. 

 

Deep annoyance settles in every inch of his being - and there are a lot of inches of Derek Hale - as he only so much as sees the queue forming at the register. Why does all of this town have to do their grocery shopping at the exact same time? It’s like they’ve all arranged this meeting. 

 

“Easy on the eye rolls,” a low and slightly bemused sounding voice says to him as he gets in line. Derek has a feeling. A hunch. Something tickling beneath his skin, icky and overall unpleasant, telling him that the voice he’s never heard before can only belong to one person. He looks up, his eyes settling on a face he hasn’t seen before either. 

 

Theo Raeken looks nothing like he’s expected. The guy isn’t tall, he’s actually several inches shorter than Derek himself. His shoulders are not that broad either. Derek figures he could easily take him. The cocky grin on his face seems childish and stupid, but not dangerous. His skin looks smooth and pale. He’s wearing a hoodie, a jean jacket and converse. All in all just like he just stepped out of high school. 

 

“Eyes up here,” Theo smirks when Derek hasn’t replied anything for just a moment too long. 

 

“Wow,” Derek shrugs, trying to sound unimpressed, “so you’re the big bad chimera everyone’s obsessed with.” 

 

“Aw, you think I’m worth obsessing over?” Theo teases. “That’s so sweet of you to say.” He smiles in fake innocence, an expression Derek would gladly volunteer to punch out of his self-righteous face.

 

“You know damn well that’s not what I think about you,” Derek growls in response, turning away so that he doesn’t have to look into the other boy’s strange eyes any longer. He’s not sure whether they’re more grey or more green, and for some inexplicable reason, that’s bothering him. 

 

“Not really, no,” Theo answers, now in a way more serious tone, “since we haven’t had the pleasure yet.” 

 

“Not a pleasure,” Derek grumbled, “that’s why I figured we could save it.” 

 

“What a shame,” Theo laughed, slipping into the spot that Derek has created in front of him by not moving along with the queue due to his distraction. He isn’t sure what game they’re playing, but he has a feeling he’s losing it. 

 

“You’re lucky I have a policy against spilling blood inside a public store in broad daylight,” mutters, giving his words the sound of a threat without causing too much attention from other shoppers. 

 

“You’re lucky I have a great ass,” Theo says with a wink as he puts down a few dollar bills on the register and picks up his stuff. “Because that way you have something nice to watch as I go,” he adds before he turns to leave. 

 

Possibly for the first time in his life, Derek doesn’t have a good comeback. He just stares while his brain is processing what just happened, totally not noticing how tight Theo’s pants are around his bouncing ass. 

 

“Fourteen dollars and seventy-nine cents, please,” the cashier repeats, maybe for the second or third time, who knows. All Derek can think about is how thoroughly fucked he is.

 

Their first encounter might have been terrible and downright humiliating for Derek, but it gets worse. So much worse. He knows that he’s in deep trouble when he wakes up in the middle of the night from a restless dream, his t-shirt sticking to his sweat-slick body, his breathing heavy. A delicate face keeps haunting him in his dreams, white skin framed by hazel brown hair, pink lips and a mole on one cheek, sharp jawlines and a light stubble. His mind is easily capable of putting the image together in great detail, everything right where it belongs and true to the original, except one thing. The eyes are missing. 

 

Derek gets up and wanders through the house for a while, clearing his head of the boy that doesn’t belong there, but he fails terribly, every attempt of a solution making the problem worse by a tenfold. He drinks ice-cold blood orange juice at beneath the moon, it soon becomes an all-nightly ritual, but nothing helps. Derek has even made a fool out of himself by asking Deaton for help, begging him to hypnotize him and save his mind from getting lost to the godforsaken chimera. 

 

_ You think I’m worth obsessing over,  _ it echoes through his head, over and over again, until Derek almost believes Theo cursed him in that moment when he said it. It’s stupid though, and he knows it. It’s all incredibly and ridiculously stupid. And by the time the sleep deprivation causes him to lose control during a full moon, Derek knows that he’s had enough. He has to do something. He has to escape this madness. He has to still the need itching in his fingers when he wakes up from yet another dream. He has to… He has to see them. He has to complete the image. He needs to know what color Theo’s eyes are. He can’t leave them out anymore. He simply can’t. 

 

Stiles is his first try. It makes the most sense, since Stiles is suspicious enough of Theo to keep track of the chimera’s moves, and on top of that, has the inside information provided by his dad, the sheriff. “Where’s this stupid chimera?” he bellows into the phone without greeting. Half an hour and a lot of incoherent stammering later, he stands in front of a blue truck. 

 

Derek would be thinking about the possible reasons why someone would be living in a car. Or why they would come back to this sorely afflicted town if there isn’t a family or a home involved. He would be. But he isn’t. He’s pressing his face against the windowpane, his hands shielding his eyes from the sun. He’s standing there, his breath fogging up the window as he’s watching a young boy sleep in the backseat, hood drawn over his head, a woollen blanket wrapped around his body. 

 

This is not the first chimera created by the dread-doctors, corrupted with the sole purpose of being evil. It’s not the bringer of death they claim him. It’s just a boy. Just a teenager. Just closed eyelids and slightly parted lips, a heaving and sinking chest hidden beneath the blanket, a body that looks like it could just as well be made out of glass, like something that shatters and cuts deeply, inflicts wounds and death where the world tries to break it. 

 

Derek leaves. He drives until he’s at the opposite end of town before he stops to catch his breath and think about what he’s just witnessed. It doesn’t make sense. It won’t go through his head. He’s not sure that he’s met the same Theo as everybody else apparently has. His mind may be playing tricks on him, it’s not like Derek would be able to tell anymore. 

 

The dreams start to change. The face is still there, but with it comes a body, lying on the cold hard street at night, shaking. When Derek reaches inside his dream to uncover the freezing boy, when he pulls the blanket back and takes a look, he finds black blood spilling from a thousand wounds. He tries to put his hands on them, to stop the blood from spilling, to save the whimpering and dying chimera before it’s too late, but there’s no rescue. Because there’s no death. 

 

One night, Derek discovers something new when he pulls back the blanket. A heart. Beating outside of Theo’s chest, lying on the ground where it doesn’t belong, but Theo is still breathing, his ribcage perfectly intact. “It doesn’t belong to me either,” dream-Theo whispers. It doesn’t matter what Derek does. The black blood keeps pooling on the street around Theo, and it drains the boy, but never enough to take his life. 

 

Theo has been to hell, Derek realizes. Hell. Endless suffering. Pain that never lessens. Something inside him shifts, and Derek wants to get up from his bed, wants to leave the house and run out of town barefoot, wants to round the globe and fight the demons of mankind, wants to scream into the void, wants to punch the universe in the face, because everything in this world is unfair, and he can feel inside him that Theo’s soul once was pure and thoroughly good, and that nothing that happened afterwards is Theo’s fault. 

 

He drowns the chaos in wolfsbane-spiked alcohol for the night, but he knows the peace won’t last. 

 

“You’ve been dreaming of me,” Theo states simply as he walks up to Derek sitting on his front porch. The chimera looks as tired as Derek feels. 

 

“How do you know?” Derek asks, his eyes glued to the dirt beneath his feet. He dreads the look into Theo’s eyes as much as he craves it. 

 

“I was there, too,” Theo replies, shrugging his shoulders as if it’s nothing special for him to be lying on the street at night bleeding beyond death. 

 

“How do you do it?” Derek wants to know after a minute of silence. He’s talking about the waking up. About going on with a life so badly haunted. He doesn’t have to explain. 

 

“Like we all do,” Theo says as he sits down next to him, his body not touching Derek, but his scent engulfing him, feeling even more like touch than actual skin on skin contact. “By putting on a mask. Being badass. Cracking bad jokes. Making lots of sexual insinuations.” 

 

“I hate your mask,” Derek whispers. He doesn’t know why he says it, doesn’t want to come across insulting. 

 

“Because you see the cracks,” Theo responds quietly. 

 

“I wasn’t even looking,” Derek admits. He really wasn't. He still doesn’t know the color of Theo’s eyes. 

 

“Maybe not,” Theo sighs. “Maybe I wasn’t on my way to Beacon Hills when I landed here. Maybe a lot of stuff just happened to me. Maybe one rumor led to the other. Maybe that’s what happens when we hold onto our masks too fiercely.” 

 

Derek doesn’t understand what any of it means. He can’t see clearly. Words keep echoing through his head, memories, thoughts. But all of that is pushed to the background by the pale hand he sees in the corner of his eye. Long fingers and bold knuckles and rough skin, blue veins standing out beneath it. Derek can smell a bitterness coming from Theo, a grim acceptance of his misery, a twistedly calm surrender, but beneath it, there is fresh blood flowing through him, air being sucked inside his lungs, something minty, something warm. 

 

“Do you want a glass of blood orange juice?” Derek asks, only afraid of saying nothing for too long. 

 

“Blood orange, huh?” Theo repeats with a smile. 

 

“I like it a little bitter, I guess,” Derek shrugs. He doesn’t realize what he’s actually saying until it’s too late to take it back. “I didn’t mean-” 

 

“No,” Theo brushes him off. “Nothing wrong with a little bitterness.” 

 

Derek nods and disappears inside. He takes two glasses from the cupboard, but takes the bottle from the fridge instead, just as it it, uncapping it and holding it out to Theo as he sits down again. The other boy takes a swig, lays his head back as he empties half the bottle before returning it. 

 

“Fucking delicious,” he judges. 

 

Derek hasn’t felt thirsty so far, but now he drinks too, aware of Theo’s eyes on him as he swallows the perfect combination of sweet and sour and bitter down. He puts the bottle away and looks up. And keeps looking. And loses himself. And he still doesn’t know whether it’s more grey or more green that he’s melting into, but what does it matter? 

 

“Can I…” Derek doesn’t know how to ask this. He’s never been this ridiculously nervous before. He really shouldn’t be. He’s gone so much further before. 

 

“What?” Theo whispers. Usually, Derek would simply do it, but with Theo, there seems to be the need to be careful. No person as strong as Theo should look this vulnerable, but he does. 

 

Derek looks down to his hand shyly. Bones and flesh and muscle and skin. Life, when you put it all together. 

 

“Blood orange,” Theo smiles, lacing their fingers together on top of Derek’s knee. Bones and flesh and muscle and skin. And a whole world inside it. 

 

***

 

For as long as he can remember caring, Derek Hale has had the monopoly of grim looks and murder vibes in Beacon Hills. He’s tall, he’s strong and well trained, he has muscles at body parts where other people don’t even have body parts. He owns just the right kind of black sports car and several dark leather jackets. You can consider yourself lucky as long as he hides his death glare behind obscure sunglasses. 

 

Of course, deep down inside Derek isn’t truly a bad guy. Not at all. He cares for his town, does whatever it takes to protect it. He’s collaborated with all sorts of annoying teenaged supernatural beings to ensure its security. Still, through all of that he’s always liked being the scary guy who nobody would ever dare to mess with. Black suits him well, and so does blood orange. 

 

A lot has changed since Theo appeared in town, and a lot hasn’t. Younger kids still switch to the other side of the street when they come across Derek, grumpy grandpas still curse his parking jobs but shut up as soon as he climbs out. He’s still one of the strongest werewolves around, one of the most powerful as well. 

 

But a part of the mask is gone whenever Theo is by his side, his frown turning into a soft smile from only so much as the touch of a loving hand. Bad dreams of never-ending pain and too dark blood still wake him up at night, but gentle arms pull him against a beating heart when it happens. How do they do it? How do they find their way back to sleep? Like we all do. Together.


End file.
